Laurel Garver's Blog, page 15

Limber up! Warm ups to get you writing

No ballerina simply straps on her toe shoes and dances Swan Lake. Nor does an Olympic sprinter roll out of bed and walk directly to the blocks. These pros know you can't perform your best unless you first warm up and stretch.

Photo credit: kakisky from morguefile.com Writer friends, we can learn from this. If you find yourself endlessly procrastinating when you know you should be writing, consider adding a period of low-pressure warm ups and stretches to your routine. You m...

Yes, I can? Affirmations for the pessimistic

You regular blog readers may find this hard to believe, but I am not a naturally optimistic person. My inclination is to always look on the shadow rather than bright side of life. (Listen carefully to the Monty Python song, though, and my inner moroseness seems positively cheerful in comparison.) I could blame my upbringing or my birth order or a host of other things, but what ultimate good would it do? Our culture loves to keep us stuck in these blame games, and has industries dedicated to h...

Support and accountability for all: The "write in"

Not every writer is ready to participate in a critique group. That requires you to have a manuscript at some state of completion that you need help improving through rewrites, revisions and editing.

Photo by Seemann, morguefile.comFor some, just getting a manuscript started is a huge task. That's where a creativity circle can be a great boon. I recently started one after hosting a writing workshop at a church event. Overwhelmingly what participants wanted most was to simply gather with others...

ARGH! Writerly frustration and how to channel it

Summer is an innately frustrating season for working moms who write (people like me), because the usual routines that help us keep some balance between roles are mostly gone. The kids are at home, there's no homework to fill the evenings, and night owl sleep patterns of the rest of the family can keep one from getting one's usual rest. I often struggle with being perpetually grouchy in the summer months because my writing time gets squeezed more than usual by family needs, and when I can eke...

Theme a little theme for me

Theme, simply put, is the Why of your story. James Scott Bell calls it “the meta-message”: the insight, lesson, or new way of seeing things you want readers to take away from your story (Story and Structure, 130).

Theme wants to be heard (photo by SQUAIO / morguefile.com). To use a cooking metaphor, theme is a powerful flavor that should be able to be tasted all through a work.

Theme is woven though the shape of the story arc, through ethical dilemmas characters face, throug...

Purging the clutter that holds you back

I'd intended to blog once I got back from Florida, where I was helping my mother prepare to move from independent to assisted living in her retirement community. What I didn't anticipate was arriving there with a toothache that turned out to be an abscessed molar. Fortunately, mom's dentist put me on an antibiotic, and we had so much to do that tasks rather than pain occupied most of my thoughts. But I kind of crashed when I got home. A root canal has alleviated the worst pain, and I'm slowly...

The stuff of life: characters and their belongings

Image: TubeRadioLand.comA trip yesterday to the Philadelphia History Museum got me thinking once again about people and their stuff. The museum is a small one, focused on Philadelphia's "material culture"--an archeology term that means physical evidence of a culture in the physical objects and architecture they make or have made. It's a study of objects to see what stories they tell us about people.

For instance, what does it tell us about an era to know it made horrid iron harness devices wit...

Eight everyday antagonists

We hear again and again that without conflict, you have no story. So what kind of conflict should you have? How will it arise? One obvious way is to toss in a bad guy and mean girl or two and let them make trouble. Alas, bad guys and mean girls can become cliched and cardboard, sucking away energy and tension rather than adding it.

Who really wants to write generic bad guys, let alone read them? Ya-awn. And who says you really need a traditional villain anyway?

Here's another concept, from Nanc...

Reclaim lost hours developing your emotions repertoire

Every season comes with special challenges for writers. In summer, it's often kids home from school, friends and family visiting, and time away for family vacation that can destroy your writing routine.

But what if time away from the keyboard could be as useful to your craft as the hours of "butt in chair"? The hours you spend out in the world can indeed be a creative gift to you, putting you in new places with access to new experiences. In particular, you have wonderful access to the laborato...

Five issues to consider when naming characters

While your real-life name is something you inherit and have to live into, up to, or out of, a fictional character's name is a tool for its creator to communicate something about the person. Juliet's contention that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" has not been borne out by the
Naming characters is one of my great joys as a writer. Finding the right name can happen almost instinctively, though I enj...